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He calls out Friday through the next Thursday like a coward, unsure what her face would do to him now. He spends the week talking on the phone with Jan and Josh and Mark drives up with him on Wednesday to help him find an apartment.

He slips through the door on Friday, packs his things in such a way that he doesn’t ever have to turn his head toward her. He doesn’t make eye contact and he doesn’t plan on saying goodbye. He’s there for a total of ten minutes which include a weepy goodbye behind Michael’s closed office door. Then he’s back in the parking lot, trying to avoid the spots of pavement where they’d been that night.

But then she’s there too and with a soft call of his name, he turns and her hair’s trailing behind her as she’s jogging to catch up with him. He stops, holding his box in front of him like some sort of shield. She’s teary eyed and asking him where he’s going and what’s going on and telling him that they should “really, really talk about this before-”

He shakes his head and this makes her stop talking. He says, “I have to go,” and walks away without looking back and forces his ears to roar just enough so he can’t hear if she cries or if she calls after him or if she says that she’s made a mistake and that she loves him, loves him, loves him.

It doesn’t matter now. He’s tired of losing battles every day and tired of standing still.

So, heartbroken, he moves east of her, hoping that the miles traversed will, like water, cleanse him of the past three years. As if when he crosses that state line, she simply won’t exist anymore. He watches the odometer and pretends that each mile erases another part of his memory. At 63 miles, he forgets her mouth and at 113 miles he forgets her name. By the time he hits 156 and he’s pulling up to his new apartment building, he hasn’t forgotten anything, but he takes a moment to pretend that he has to reach and reach to even remember what color her eyes were.

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He isn’t used to living in a small apartment all alone. The cost of living had been cheaper in Scranton and it had been nice to live in a real house with a friend. Now he finds that it takes two and a half steps to get to the kitchen and that it gets so quiet at night that he has to turn the radio on while he’s falling asleep.

The ceiling is cracked and everyone else in the building is over the age of forty. The plumbing is ancient and the pipes squeak and click all day and all night. The floor is scuffed and splintering so he lays area rugs down all over. He has one window and it’s in the living room and during the afternoons, the sunlight floods the entire space of the apartment, spills all over the carpet and makes his skin too warm when he’s trying to watch TV on the weekends.

His entire life fit into three boxes and one garbage bag, but he tries not to think about that for too long. He didn’t take any furniture because it had all been Mark’s save the TV stand, but he buys a new one and spends an afternoon putting it together himself. It makes him feel like an adult for once. To be surrounded by tools and parts and spending an hour cursing at vague instructions. He feels different in a way he’s been trying to feel for years now.

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On his first day, he wears a suit with the buttons on his cuffs buttoned and everything. He ties his tie carefully in the bathroom mirror, making sure that it’s straight and neat. He slips on the jacket and despite his best efforts, he still feels like a kid dressing up like his dad. But he runs a hand over his face and looks back at his reflection, convincing himself that this is his life now.

He bought himself a new bag because he’d found a scrap of paper with loopy handwriting and a crude sketch of Dwight in the front pocket of his old one and he’d almost remembered. There had been a flash of the way she bites her lip in concentration and the way her fingers hold onto pencils. But he’d thrown the bag out without even checking to see if he’d left anything else in there. The new one was clean, untainted, and he slings it over his shoulder, but instead of feeling refreshed or reborn he just feels sort of hollowed out and numb.

The Stamford office is all angles and clean lines and cold, hard sort of architecture. He feels nervous when he walks through the door, intimidated by the sound of clicking keyboards and hushed phone conversations. The desks face in one direction and no one even tries to make eye contact with him as he walks in.

It’s quiet for most of the day and he sits at his desk, getting acquainted with the few differences in the way sales are handled in Stamford. He waits to hear someone laugh in the distance, but there’s nothing. He waits for someone to turn around and look at him or say something to him, but he’s met with someone coughing and the sound of a phone being placed back into its cradle.

He feels alone and almost misses having someone with their desk butted right up against his. (Not that he misses Dwight at all. No.)

Andy, the sales rep who sits in front of him seems nice enough, if not still stuck in his college years. After lunch, tries to talk to Jim about fraternities and when Jim says he never rushed and that he actually dropped out of college after a couple years, Andy just says, “Oh, well, I was in basically every fraternity at Cornell and, let me tell you, I had to have my stomach pumped four times one weekend.”

Jim doesn’t believe any of this, much less that Andrew Bernard actually attended Cornell University and somehow still ended up working for Dunder Mifflin. And it’s then that he starts to realize that maybe Stamford isn’t quite so different from Scranton and he isn’t sure if he’s relieved or terrified.

Then there’s Karen. She hasn’t said a word to him yet today, but she’s pretty and on his way to the bathroom, he notices the deep V of her button down shirt as she bends a little to jot something down. Eventually, he turns to talk to her, because it seems as though she’s never going to initiate a conversation.

So he smiles, whispering and jerking his head back towards Andy’s desk, “So what’s the deal with this Andy guy?”

He’s thankful to see a smile spread across her face as she leans toward him and says in a low voice, “No one’s really sure, but we’re pretty sure Cornell is actually the name of the institution he escaped from.”

It feels good to laugh so he lets it go on for a while, saying, “That makes so much sense. And when he talks about fraternities…”

“Group therapy,” she says quickly. And then her demeanor changes and her smile turns soft and warm, “It’s really nice to have another normal person here.”

“Oh, this is nothing compared to Scranton. Andy would be normal in that office.”

Her nose scrunches up, “Wow. I don’t even want to know.” And then, “Well, at least you made it out alive,” and there’s a hand on his arm that’s warm and different and he feels this tightening in his throat which is kind of embarrassing so he smiles quickly and turns back to his computer.

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He doesn’t know anyone else in the city so he stays in, watches the street from the window. Sometimes he goes to bed early, but just lays there staring at the ceiling, his body aching in places he can’t pinpoint, keeping him awake for hours on end until he falls asleep with forty-five minutes until his alarm goes off.

There are some nights when he finds himself watching the phone, waiting for it to do something. As if he could will fingers that are 150 miles away to dial his number, a number she doesn’t even know, and talk to him about silly things, trivial things, things that don’t matter and don’t involve love or that night or anything. Just jokes and laughs and long distance smiles. But that never happens and his eyes go dry after half an hour of staring.

Nights are hardest for him, because there’s too much time and empty space. He starts thinking about that parking lot and what had been in his pockets when he walked away from her: his cell phone, a considerable amount of lint, and the foil left over from an old pack of breath mints. He starts thinking about how her lip gloss had left a slightly floral taste on his lips that kept him awake for the entire night.

Because, really, the miles in between here and there haven’t erased any part of his memory at all.

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May goes out slowly, but then it’s the beginning of June and he’s sort of made friends with the one younger guy in his building who lives in the apartment just below him. They’d started talking while Jim was getting his mail one day and then he invited him up to play video games and now they sort of hung out and talked sometimes out on the front stoop of their building and he feels sort of like they’re kids who grew up in Brooklyn and play stickball after school or something. They lean back with their elbows on the cement steps and laugh while the sun goes down and they don’t have very much in common, but Jim’s gotten almost desperate for something to distract him so he sits there with Ben and just listens to him talk for a while.

But June isn’t any easier than May had been. Because this is the month and he finds himself absently flipping through a bridal magazine someone left in the break room while he’s eating lunch. He looks at the dresses and wonders what hers looks like, wonders if they’ll do traditional vows or write their own. He writes Roy’s in his head and they’re ridiculous things like, “I promise to rotate our love as often as I rotate my truck’s tires,” and he’s not even sure that makes sense, but it at least makes him smile for even a millisecond.

His thoughts become overrun with this sort of thing so he starts knocking on Ben’s door every night, holding a six pack in his hand and saying, “Isn’t there a game on tonight?” Any game, any sport, anything to stop him from looking at example place settings online or wondering where they’re registered and if he should send them silverware or a new toaster oven.

Ben doesn’t ask him questions and he likes that. He just lets him in and cracks open a beer while throwing himself back into his leather couch, turning on the TV. Jim sits down next to him, not even sure what teams are playing or if he even really cares and he feels words coming out of his mouth about it, getting angry at the appropriate times and accepting high fives when he has to.

But he isn’t really there at all. It isn’t who he is anyway. He’s playing a part for himself. He’s rehearsed this.

And if he‘s being honest, Ben is the sort of guy Jim normally can’t stand. He smokes a lot of pot and likes cheap beer and has awful taste in music. He also starts every sentence with some variation of the term “dude.”

It’s just nice to have a friend again. And sometimes he’ll smoke with Ben and when he’s holding the smoke down deep in his lungs, there’s a hot burn in his chest and it makes his head swim a little. And it’s something so strangely reminiscent of love, of her, but in a better way. He can remember her without the usual accompanying sting for a second as he exhales a cloud of smoke into the filtered sunlight of late afternoon.

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He wakes up on June 10th and waits. For her to show up at his door, call him. He waits until it’s eight o’clock at night and he’s certain the ceremony’s long since been over and now she’s probably dancing with him while her entire extended family watches and smiles. She’s probably tipsy from champagne and love and the idea of her future finally being in front of her and she’s probably happy.

He finds himself leaving a message on her cell phone. He’s saying, “I’m really sorry things happened the way they happened, but I don’t regret anything. And, uh, I hope you had a good day. I honestly only wish you the best. Um, anyway, congratulations.”

He imagines his voice will sound thin and sad in her ear as he splashes cold water on his face. He imagines her deleting the message and tossing her phone on the end table of some hotel room somewhere as Roy comes up behind her, kissing her as she laughs.

He stays up all night just in case she calls him back.

She doesn’t.

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He’s tired of living inside himself with all of his misery and self inflicted pain so when June is coming to a close, he deletes her phone number from his phone and throws out any reminders he kept of her, including paper doves and notes on neon colored post-its and a chain of paperclips whose shine has since dulled away. He spends a night drinking to erase her from his memory and when he wakes up the next morning with the sun shining violently in his eyes, he groans and for once doesn’t think of her first thing.

He asks Karen to dinner that second to last Friday in June and she hesitates for a second so he makes a joke or says something (it should be telling that he can’t remember what he did exactly) that makes her laugh and then she nods with her lips pressed together in a smile she’s trying not to show.

He’d said it was casual so when he opens the door and she’s wearing a black dress and heels, he has to stop and put a hand on her doorjamb, gripping it tightly. And she likes that he does this, grinning slyly at him as she grabs her purse and pushes him back out into the hallway of her apartment building.

She offers to pick the restaurant because he’s new and she wants to show him where all the good places are. So they end up at a little French café, sitting outside, watching people pass on the sidewalk. There’s a breeze that brings the smell of saltwater to them and he watches it blow her hair around her face as she hunches her shoulders a little, shivering. And he’s sort of thankful for a minute that he moved to a city near water, because he thinks for a brief, fleeting second that he could fall for her when she’s surrounded by a sunset sky with her hair sticking to her lips.

And it feels good to even think he could fall for someone else.

But he feels far away from himself for the moment. Because this is so unlike how his life had been just a month ago. He never thought he’d be sitting in Connecticut with a olive skinned girl in a strapless black dress with a skirt that flows until just below her knees. He never thought he’d be taking his jacket from the back of his chair and swinging it over her shoulders, watching her smile with gratitude as she pulled it around herself. He feels more like a spectator than a participant.

The newness of it all makes him feel lightheaded and he has to stop and put his hands flat on the table in front of him to steady himself.

He’s here, he’s okay. He made it through what he thought was the worst thing that could ever happen to him. And he’s alive. She’d broken his heart, but he’s alive now. He says it over and over and over to himself until the waiter comes and she orders for him in French.

He’s here, he’s okay.